Hello all,

It’s my end of the year – throw everything in – email… I’m dropping balls all over the place which can only mean that it’s Christmas. Hope everyone is as well as they can be and that downtime and rest is possible (note to self). This mail is a quick sum up of art happenings and mentoring news with some exciting projects ahead for 2025. For those of you that are following my ‘Go Fund Me’ campaign to raise monies for my suicide awareness project, the pitch to Arts Council England will be submitted in the next few weeks. The amount raised stands at £2,750 which is amazing and will count as match funding for my grant application. Thanks a million to those who donated, it’s helped me immensely. More details here

https://gofund.me/c901667

Current and future exhibitions

If you happen to be in Lapland I have a huge drawing in a wonderful show there in Galleria Napa, Rovaniemi. The show brings together contemporary drawing from all over the world – link below. I’m on the wall next to some incredible artists so it’s a huge honour. My piece is a liquid charcoal drawing of a bee- the memory of a bee from an encounter earlier on this year when we kind of communed with each other. I loved that bee and made several pieces of work from this experience which I shared in my last newsletter. The exhibition runs from now until 31stDecember.

https://www.lapintaiteilijaseura.fi/en/events/visual-art-weeks-of-the-artists-association-of-lapland-2/

In January I’ll be showing a drawing and a giclee print in Lisbon at an exhibition called Shadow/Sombre at Forum Grandela in Benfica from 24th Jan to 21st Feb 2025. The show explores shadows through mythology, psychology and literature gathering work from 12 international artists who dive into these themes within their practise. ‘A Cartology of grief’ (below) is an image of a drawing on fabric which maps a somatic exploration of my grief journey through the visible and invisible. A linear work made with and in water. Many thanks to Olivia Hicks for inviting me to be a part of this show.

Solo show at Brighton Art Space 28th Feb to 2ndMarch 2025

I’m excited to be taking over two floors of the wonderful Brighton Art Space with current process work towards an exhibition in Newhaven in 2026. This will be mostly installation based pieces and smaller prints and drawings. No name for the show as yet but the work explores the colour blue as a vibrational energy linking memory, spirituality and immersion in nature as vehicles for grief healing. You will have seen my feed on Instagram entirely saturated with ultramarine blue. It’s holding me suspended in a creative hyperspace, come see the show where everything may make more sense..

https://brightonartspace.com

 some blue things happening.. see pics below

 Mentoring and teaching news

My mentoring practise has exploded this year, and my cohort is full until late Spring 2025 which is amazing. I’m also mentoring for Offset Projects in Milton Keynes with an initiative called Arthouse which champions under 25s gain confidence in their art practise after leaving further education. In April I’m freelancing pt with Team Domenica , a fantastic charity helping people with learning disabilities navigate internships and placements in Brighton.

I’m still teaching practical oil painting but currently have no space, there is a wait list if anyone is interested.

Flowers for Freedom

My floral drawing fundraising initiative runs until mid-January 2025 when I’ll be donating monies raised to War Child UK. Please see my website for remaining available drawings, I’ve raised around £200 already which is great. I’d love to donate more, the purchase of a drawing at £220 enables me to donate £55 to this much needed cause. Please share with any interested parties. Link below to my website

https://www.carriestanley.co.uk/artwork

 Available drawings pic below. Middle row far right now sold.

I also have a few seasonal offers available on original works via the above link – all works under £1,000  at studio prices. This piece below is one of my favourites from my solo show earlier this year.

 Will – o – the – wisp 110 x 110cm oils on linen £750

 That’s it for now. Keep in touch via email or Substack. I wanted to end with a massive thank you for following or supporting and to everyone who has bought work, is a past or current mentee and who recommends me to others either as an artist or mentor. I feel truly blessed to be following this path even though it’s very hard at times. As my work continues to grow and evolve, I’m realising how important people and communities are to my practise. Creative healing is at its core and that’s where my energies will continue to go.

Huge hugs

Carrie XX

Pics : Will -o-the-wisp, Flowers for Freedom drawings , blue things in the studio, ‘Cartology of grief’ print for Shadow/Sombre exhibition, Bodie our new pup ..

Un-Bound

An installation of work as part of an ongoing project exploring complicated grief. The work is evolving as a response to autobiographical lived experience of traumatic loss through suicide.

Through this project I aim to honour my own journey post loss, to bypass stigma and shame and to enable allowance in others to find creative ways to work through their own experiences.

Un- Bound brings together works focusing on the body as a vessel and a conduit for trapped memory. The physical making of the larger pieces, ‘Now you see me’ and ‘The Keener’, harnesses grief as an energy which can be expelled and relocated as vigorous linear mappings of movement. These gestural works are not only freeing but also give form to hitherto unexplainable emotions.

This can also be explained through ‘Catch’; a performative work filmed on the South Downs where a figure dances freely and with abandon to Catch by the Cure. For this work I constructed a

headpiece from amaranthus stems which totally covers the face. The plant was a favourite of my late husband and is reminiscent of tender, playful times late night dancing together. It honours those moments as a memorial lament of silliness and happiness, so important when processing traumatic loss.

The works ‘I saw the truth undressing’, ‘Corolla’ and ‘memory falls like cream in my bones’ all aim to explore flesh as a substance for storing memory and for protection. In these works I dissect and rebuild the physical self pulling apart and away to see what lies beneath, a mental vivisection attempting to pull out and set free. I envisage these painterly acts as a form of self care.

In the metal trolley piece ‘How to rebuild a life’, the sentiment is the same. Here body parts are piled up and separated ready for analysis before being remade into something new. The soul is a shadow form laid across the bottom shelf open to being reconstructed.

‘Carpe Noctem in five parts’ is a work which evolved as a translation of a lost negative of a place once visited before my husband died. I cut up a much larger work to relocate the pieces as smaller capsules of memory and time. Windows into and onto a fragmented past which can be moved around as wished much like the non linear process of grief itself.

I have been looking forward to this exhibition by the artist Carrie Stanley for a long time. It is a special show for several reasons of which I will explain further . I saved myself a good hour or more to look at the paintings and absorb them and have since returned a few times. It was a beautiful sunny day when I first entered the small, intimate space after an awful few months of endless rain. The sunlight shining directly on a large yet seemingly intimate painting “Night Swimming” the heavenly light shining upon beautiful cadmium yellow with shadowy figures, suggestive of a memory of something imagined. Like a dream, I found it an almost spiritual experience upon entering the space. I have since found out how important the experience and how integral Colour is to Carrie’s work.

I have known about Carrie’s work as an artist for a long time. I knew and was fond of her late husband Mike and I have connected with her work through her instagram pages and in particular her “Visual Grief Diaries” which document her feelings and makes eloquent visual documentation on the process around her and her own family’s grief. For this Carrie Stanley makes evocative searching drawings and paintings and sometimes performative actions which embody and reflect the process of memory and of grief. It is profoundly moving and extraordinarily brave work, which often stops me in my tracks and I believe is in itself groundbreaking, and inspiring for helping others in coping ; especially with the aftermath of and coping with loved ones lost.

The untangling and constant unravelling of feelings associated with  loss is of course integral to, and forms the basis of this show, and is I believe (though not the only) , a very special element of the fascinating and unique paintings that have emerged and evolved in the years since and are now flowing into Carrie’s ongoing work. 

The most immediate thing I notice as an artist and painter myself is the attention to and interaction with material, and also a lovely sense of the joy of the painting process itself , and the immediacy of it all. The paintings all have a sense of layering, each gesture opening up another layer or memory.

Recently In a talk I conducted with the choreographer Siobhan Davies (as part of a Symposium at the University of Oxford on the theme of “Gesture”) Davies spoke to me about the way that a simple gesture in painting and dance can reveal, hold and open up so much in terms of memory. The choreographer is interested in and is working on archives, and Carrie Stanley’s paintings seems to embody this notion, and hold so much within. This idea which resonates with my own interests, of the painting being a whole body experience is something contained in the work and inspires Carrie, especially the work of the Choreographer Martha Graham who eloquently expressed emotion through basic human movement. This is explored in artists I myself admire and are influenced by such as Carolee Schneemann and Florence Peake,the Vienna Actionists , the Gutai movement, Yoko Ono . Where painting and the body are almost synonymous. The sensory experience and presence of the body is somehow tangible in Carrie Stanley’s paintings. 

Archival material also forms a big part of Carrie’s process, the paintings making use of and work directly from an archive of her husband Mike’s negatives for photographs of which she has a big collection of (Mike Stanley was himself trained as, and was a talented artist himself which made him such an uniquely important director).

The way Carrie works with the negatives though, gives the paintings a touching palpable and loving feeling that there is another presence being revealed and sometimes hidden making the works feel simultaneously personal , poignant and powerful . I recently went to a show of the Chinese artist Xie Nanxing in London which some of Carrie’s work brought to my mind. The clever layering, and sense of something being erased , revealed and erased again. It creates an enigmatic mystery to each piece. 

The colour and materiality of the work on display here is both extraordinary and striking. In all the paintings there are elements of the surface coming to the fore, with staining and pouring with tentative gestural markings, and a constant awareness of the the canvas  itself. There is a great sense that the whole process is gently being revealed.

The painting ‘ Mistress of Crewell’ I had go up to several times as I thought it had a 3D effect and perhaps used gauzes. The startling illusory effect on the eye created by the way the canvas had been unusually stretched behind, almost appearing like embroidery emphasising the raw canvas and the layering of different tecniques. Apparently, the mesh around the edges of the canvas were triggered by a childhood memory of feeling the edges of an embroidered cloth. It is an extraordinary tactile and unique piece. Each of the paintings seem to somehow encapsulate a sensory healing process which emanates from the surfaces and colours, and the revealed processes within. There seems to be a musical element too in some of the work, especially in the application of paint which seems to contain much movement especially in the more abstract pieces such as “Evensong” and “The Gloaming”. The title of the exhibition itself comes from a song by Kate Bush. 

There is also a sense within the exhibition of a deep engagement with current contemporary painting, and the history of painting too, and there were several occasions when I thought of many different painters contemporary and historical. Hurvin Anderson, Alvaro Barrington, Odilon Redon, Graham Sutherland (Vespers) and even the infra red photos of Richard Moss ( Japanese Garden and To the Wedding) and Per Kirkby (Biomorphic Botanic).

The Colour is both exuberant and at the same time thoughtful. Some of the colours, and paintings have elements of decoration, of flowers and foliage but the colour is often unearthly, beguiling and has a great power in itself. When entering the show one is struck immediately by the boldness and the purity of the colours. The colour is purposeful , often symbolic and literal revealing memory and imagination. The pink is that of Geraniums ( a particular favourite flower of Carrie’s) for its associations with both Mike and their respective families’ love of the flower, her own love emanating from the colour and for the memory it holds. This is further explored in posts on her instagram, where flowers and colours become a conduit for acts of love and healing. There is a beautiful Instagram post I recall of steeping Amaranth flowers in hot water to make intense colours . I was reminded of these posts when looking at the paintings.

In Paintings such as “Mistress of Crewell” figures seem to emerge and dilute , sometimes as if half forgotten or remembered. There is a sense of weird unearthliness and also of both time past and time remembered, interwoven. The material and diluted forms also made me think of shrouds , perhaps again suggesting the importance of the material left, symbolic perhaps also of the life lingering on and left within the image. Lately I have been reading an insightful book by Dr Jennifer Johnson about the largely under-sung painter Georges Rouault which explores the materiality of the artist’s work and also in connection to Gustave Moreau and symbolism which I couldn’t help thinking about also in relation to Carrie Stanley’s work.

The showing here is in a Elizabethan small gallery space, but somehow this makes it all the more touching for me to be with, and close up with. Sometimes in countless white galleries, you can lose the essence of and the sensory experience of painting.

This exhibition felt personal, surrounded almost as if you are in the artist’s studio itself. The paintings despite their elegiac feeling, are full of life, hope and seem to embody a rare searching quality, which somehow emanates and expands from within each painting. Most of all though there is a sense of urgency , and aliveness and a deep presence within them all. They are all individually special in this intimate and gently powerful show. 

Mark Rowan-Hull April 2024

Overwhelming eve @derwentartprize private view. The gallery was bursting with talented and gorgeous souls. So great to chat to (and thank) @helenrwaters and @curtisartist two of the four judges, also the lovely @jakespicerart and the very talented @laurajacobsart. June Collier was the well deserved winner, her portrait ‘Hetty in hospital’ is profoundly moving. So good to see the work of @_laurahope and @zahrakbari_b -lovely friends who couldn’t make it but whose work shone bright.
Thanks to @galleryoxo for hosting and @parkerharrisco for organising.
So hard to get decent photos as it was so busy.

Pleased we made it as my anxiety put paid to many recent attempts to be in London. Felt good to talk about grief and my project @visual_grief_diary with people who asked.

Looking forward to my drawing demo on 13th April in the gallery and a chance for closer viewing of all the work. Just a few pics here of works in the show -more to come .

in September 2012 my husband Michael Stanley took his life by suicide leaving behind myself (his wife) and our three children aged 11, 10 and 6 at the time. Even writing this now almost 11 years on it seems unbelievable and shocking.

I rebuilt our lives slowly and with many pitfalls along the way, I'm still rebuilding whilst managing complicated grief in all it's manifestations. This story is mostly about me and not him. That part of our lives is for us alone. I make it in his honour though and so that I know I did my absolute best to tackle the tragedy of his death with the life that he wanted us to have.

I was always an artist and educator but never really allowed my own voice into my practise until Covid hit. Enforced lockdown and some time to reflect on what I really wanted to say with my work allowed me to access and focus on my own story and to use it in an honest and open way. The focus was self healing but in sharing the work through social media I found that it was helping others too.

Making real and visual the very difficult experiences of my own suicide recovery was and is empowering, creates allowance and validates specific moments that felt shameful through the stigma that still surrounds this tragic way to die.

I was awarded an Arts Council England DYCP grant in 2022 which funded 10 months of starting this process of creative investigation. The funding gave me peer support through a critique program, mentor support, a writing residency on a creatives canal boat amongst many other amazing experiences. It helped push me forward and I'm massively grateful for everything the grant brought with it.

But the work inevitably goes on.. I'm now fuelled by a need to collate this work, enable it to be experienced by others, to let it grow and reach it's natural conclusion. My goal is the same ; to present the most honest and open journey ( my journey). The work expresses not only the deepest tragedy but also the joy of being alive in the here and now and what we can do to embrace that. How we can transmute grief into something 'other' that helps people deal with and face their own experiences. How we can lead positive lives going forward and  to heal through creativity. 

I started an instagram page/blog a couple of years ago @visual_grief_diary which is a space for me to reflect and share my work. It's not edited and is often raw and direct. Through this page I've had conversations with many many people who have given me such heartfelt feedback. I can see that it's helping others and this gives me the biggest boost to carry on. To have a positive purpose is another step in beating the overwhelm of suicide loss.

Funds raised through this page will go directly into supporting me making this work, will pay for my time and research.. Will help fund finding venues for the exhibition, accessing support organisations and approaching potential collaborators. I'm aiming for an exhibition which will travel to a few spaces in order to reach the widest audience. There will be talks, possibly a symposium around creative healing, hopefully a publication collating my writings and drawings... so many aims. I’m working towards bringing this all to fruition in late 2024 -early 2025. 

I'm grateful for any support given, it means the world to me. Thank you in advance and follow my story through my instagram page and updates here.

Carrie XX

In this episode, Painterly podcast was joined in my studio by artist Carrie Stanley for a beautiful conversation about expressing grief through art, how her practice evolved after the loss of her husband to suicide, Joan Didion, public art for collective grief, and cultural differences around expressing loss.